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Wednesday, May 17, 2017

The Black Stone Excerpted

In
defiance of former President Barack Obama’s September 25th 2012 dictum to the
General Assembly of the United
Nations that “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet
of Islam,” that’s my
cue to slander, Mohammad, Islamic snowflakes, and Islam. He said more or
less the same in June 2009
in Cairo during his pontificating, cliché-rich address at Al-Azhar
University, in front of an audience of turbaned and rag-headed Islamic clerics
and officials.

Since
its original publication in 2014, my detective novel, The
Black Stone , set in San Francisco in 1930, has experienced
continuing sales in its print, Kindle and Audible editions. In terms of
excoriating Islam, however, it was preceded by a suspense novel, We
Three Kings, set in our time in New York City, in which an American
entrepreneur, Merritt Fury, is thrown to the Saudi wolves who have been granted
carte blanche to deal with him as
they pleased. It was written in 1980 but not published until 2010. It, too, has
enjoyed continuing sales.

While
in We Three Kings the hero knows who
his enemy is, a member of the Wahhabist
Saudi royal family, in The Black Stone
Islam is a new nemesis to the hero, new to the police, new to American politicians,
new to the FBI, new to virtually everyone.The Muslim Brotherhood was only a few years old, founded
in 1922 by Hassan al-Banna as a private association of Egyptian Muslims obsessed
with the austere, alleged purity of Islamic doctrine and practice, and was late
in 1928, reorganized into a political organization that has been active in
Egyptian politics since the early 20th century.

As
a relatively new activist organization, the Brotherhood had its tentacles
almost everywhere in Mideast political life. The Brotherhood was hostile to everything
Western to modernization, to living on earth. It is basically a death
cult. When it speaks of “peace,” it is the quietude of death; that is, it
will bring “peace” to Muslims when they are no longer annoyed by the existence
of infidels, Jews, and other unbelievers and no longer need to wage jihad on Western civilization, which the
Brotherhood wishes
to extinguish..

Wahhabism
is named after an eighteenth-century preacher and activist, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–1792).
He started a reform movement in the remote, sparsely populated region of Najd, advocating a
purging of such widespread Sunni practices as the veneration of saints,
the seeking of
their intercession, and the visiting of their tombs, all of which were practiced
all over the Islamic world, but which he considered idolatry (shirk),
impurities and innovations in Islam (Bid'ah).
Eventually he formed a pact with a local leader Muhammad
bin Saud offering political obedience and promising that protection and
propagation of the Wahhabi movement mean "power and glory" and rule
of "lands and men."

I feature the cover of The Black Stone in my December 2015 column, “Islam
in Contemporary Fiction,” but do not discuss the novel. So, here are some
excerpts

At the request of a
local rabbi and scholar, Skeen is investigating the brutal murder of a young
Jewish girl, the client’s daughter. Set in San Francisco, the crime is unlike anything
he’s ever dealt with before. He knows little or nothing about Islam, only that
there are such creatures as “Moslems.” What little he knows he had learned from
newspaper accounts of Moslem atrocities committed on Jews, Armenians, and
Christians in the Middle East. At one point, he is sitting for his wife, Dilys,
an artist, as she sketches him for a planned painting.

Skeen said, "I've been dipping in the Koran.
It's worse than the Bible in many respects. Utterly schizophrenic in
parts. One moment you're being urged to behave like St. Francis, and be kind to
all animals, even Jews and other infidels. The next it's inveighing against
Jews and other infidels, calling for their extermination. It's beginning to
read like a manual for a career in sadomasochism, authored apparently by a
person currently incarcerated in Sing Sing, and provided with a liberal and
lifetime supply of cannabis or some other hallucinatory pharmaceutical product.
You know, one of those serial killer convicts who finds religion."

Dilys said, "Surely you're exaggerating."

Skeen shook his head. "Remember that my sole
encounters with Islam in the past were two of Mr. Winston Churchill's books about
his experiences in the Sudan and the Indian Northern Frontier in which he
describes Moslems, or Mohammedans, or Muslims and their practices and
fanaticism, then my declining an invitation to join the Ancient Arabic Order of
the Noble Shriners last year – can you picture me wearing a red fez decorated
with mystical symbols? – "

Again, Dilys looked incredulous. "Wahhabists? As in
the Wabash River? Or should it be the Swanee?"

"No, not quite. I'm not sure of how to pronounce it,
either. Say! I think I'll use that phrase of yours the next time anyone asks me
about the Ikhwan."

"What phrase?"

"The icky ones."

Dilys shrugged. "I thought that was what you said.
You're welcome to it."

"According to Philby and Picket, they're first-class
throat cutters. Very similar to the Thugees of India, who were stranglers."
Skeen chuckled. "That would be a sight. Allah versus Kali. More
interesting than both Dempsey-Tunney fights. Kali, you see, would have twice
the punching power."

"Why?"

"She'd have four arms. She could deliver a double
sucker punch. I wouldn't put my money on Allah."

"I'm not a betting woman."

Skeen paused before replying. "You bet on me."

Dilys shook her head. "No, I didn't. I set my cap
for you the moment I laid eyes on you." She sighed. "I'm finished
here. You can go back to your icky ones and the Wabashites."

At
another point in the story, Dilys and Skeen are having breakfast:

"Did you know," Skeen asked
casually over breakfast the next morning, "that Mohammedans, when they go
on a pilgrimage to Mecca, must walk counter-clockwise around the Kaaba seven
times, and run between some hills looking for water, and perform a schedule of
other rituals, all designed to make them feel like silly, worthless asses?"

"Kaaba?" asked Dilys, who was paying
only half attention to her husband. "Sounds like a Greek dish, smothered
in the finest feta cheese sauce, and best served with ouzo." She was
reading the morning Observer-World. She had fixed a breakfast of scrambled
eggs, bacon, and toast. Skeen had just poured himself a second coffee and was
on his first cigarette of the day. He was reading from notes he had made last
night in his study and had passed the newspaper over to Dilys.

"The Kaaba," read Skeen, "is
a cube-like structure smack in the middle of an open-air mosque about the size of
Kezar Stadium, about forty-four feet high and fifty in length. Other scholars
reverse the dimensions. It is built of granite on the outside, marble on the
inside. It sits on a spot, according to Mohammedan lore, that Allah designated
that Adam and Eve should build a temple, or an altar." Skeen paused.
"Of course, that story must have been concocted after the Kaaba had been a
pagan shrine for an undetermined number of centuries, housing scores of other
deities. Allah's own genealogical antecedents seem to be rooted in a moon god
of fecundity."

Dilys looked up from the newspaper.
She said, wearing an incredulous but amused frown, "You're making that
up."

Skeen chuckled. "No, I'm not.
It's all in the encyclopedia."

Dilys shook her head. "I know
you're not. Forgive me for saying, but it still sounds like you're
ad-libbing."

Skeen smiled wickedly. "Great
material for a stand-up comedy monologue at the Fantasma Theater." He went
on. "The Kaaba is skirted by an enormous black silk table cloth, with
Koranic verses embroidered in gold, high enough out of reach of light-fingered
pilgrims." He paused. "Presumably, the roof is bare, but somehow water-proofed.
All in all, the Kaaba that exists today is just one of several that have been
built, destroyed, collapsed by floods, damaged in war, redesigned, and gussied
up ever since it probably began as a stone shanty erected by heathens thousands
of years ago, housing wart-nosed witches they probably called vestal virgins,
visited by decrepit old priests who performed Masonic-like rites over bowls of
foul-smelling incense."

Not a tea party: Hassan al-Banana, second
from the left.

“Big
Al” to his fellow fez heads.

Dilys chuckled. "I can just
picture it now. Thousands of the heathen votary doing a syncopated conga around
the place to a mad drum beat. Some cranky old priest on the roof with a
megaphone acts as a cheerleader, prompting them to shout en masse some obscene imprecation in Arabic, or whatever they spoke
back then."

Skeen shrugged. "I suppose so.
Or perhaps it it's 'Hadge,' as in 'badge.' There was no pronunciation guide in
the encyclopedia." He frowned. "As for Mecca, historians and
cartographers aren’t even sure the place existed when the alleged prophet,
Mohammad, or Muhammad, is said to have graced the Kaaba with his presence and
laid the Black Stone. They think it might have been a backwater town, a kind of
camel stop, noted by Ptolemy, called Macoraba. Which, in turn, raises a
question mark over the existence of Mohammad himself. It's all quite
hilarious." Skeen put aside his notes. "And that's all I was able to
glean from my sources here." He finished his coffee. "I'll be going
downtown today to find more books on Islam. Care to come along?"

Dilys shook her head. "No,
thank you. I want to work on 'Phryne' and address some issues about her
audience." She frowned again. "Why this sudden interest in
Islam?"

"Professor Lerner advised me
to look into it."

Later
in the novel, Skeen discusses Islam and “Moslems” and the murder of a New York
reporter in the city over lunch in a restaurant with Mickey Kane, a local
newspaper reporter.

Kane replied, "Now you've lost
me. I know nothing about them. How many names do they got any way?"

"Just those, that I know of. And
I didn't know much about them or their creed, either, until Professor Lerner suggested
that I read up on Islam, which I did over the weekend. It's his contention that
the person or persons who killed his daughter were Moslems. Bodily mutilation
is their modus operandi, he said,
when the issue is differences about religion. Sometimes even race. And these
two murders fit it."

"How so?"

"In the realm of Islamic
justice, a thief's hand or both hands can be cut off. But Dwyer got the whole
business because he wasn’t a Moslem.
His head was removed, probably while he was still alive."

"And Rachel Lerner got it
because she was a Jew?"

Skeen nodded. "But whoever was
responsible for Dwyer was after information. Thus the torture. What was his
killer after? Did he succeed in getting what he wanted from Dwyer?"

Their lunches came then. They silently
agreed to discuss other things while they ate. Kane gave Skeen a colorful
description of Klamath Falls (where he had just vacationed).

Kane finished his sandwich last,
and went for another coffee. When he returned, he asked Skeen, "So, fill
me in on these Mummers."

Skeen chuckled. "Mohammedans.
Or Moslems. You can look up all the variations at the library." He lit a
cigarette and briefly described Islam and its fundamental tenets and rules.

Kane looked incredulous, but he
believed what Skeen had told him. "What a bunch of crackers!" he
said. "Do these guys also speak in tongues, and roll on the ground, and
foam at the mouth?"

"They probably speak Arabic,
for starters. At least, that's what the Koran
is written in, although there's evidence it was originally penned in Aramaic.
They pray five times a day, on their hands and knees, and bang their foreheads
on the ground or floor. As for foaming at the mouth, that seems to happen when
they're on the warpath, or beating their wives, or cutting men's throats."

"And this Catawba in Mecca,
these pilgrims run around it seven times and kiss something called the Black
Stone? Is that anything like the Blarney Stone? You kiss it and you're given
the gift of gab?"

Skeen chuckled again. Kane was just
as amusing as was Dilys. "It's the Kaaba, and I don’t know of any purpose
in kissing the Stone, other than to prove you have a rock fetish, are not a
little addled, and wish to be in the company of a multitude of fools."

"Do you think any of these Catawbans
live here?"

Skeen shook his head. "It's
doubtful."

"That Hajj pilgrimage you described: It sounds like one long college
fraternity initiation."

Kane sighed. "Well, I think I'll read up on
this gang, too. Library, here I come." He put out his Lucky Strike.
"But where can you take it from here? What can you do about it? I mean,
suppose it wasn't a genuine Catawban who killed the Lerner girl and Dwyer, but
someone who wants everyone to think it was?"

"It's a good question, Mickey,
and I don’t have an answer. Not yet, anyway. Perhaps never."He paused. "Would you make me a copy of
the Dwyer note?"

"No problem. I'll send it to
your office later today." Kane glanced at his watch. He collected the
Dwyer note and returned it to his envelope. "I gotta get back to the
paper. I'm working on a story about a guy who tried to rob a trolley conductor
of his day's fares yesterday, and got the hell beat out of him."

More murders are committed, all pointing to Muslims as the
perpetrators, and the murderer himself is murdered to keep him quiet about the
identity of his partners in homicide. By novel’s end Skeen has solved the
crimes, and recovered the priceless relic sought by the Brotherhood
operatives.

It has a just fate in Skeen’s hands. He gives it away to a
bankrupted businessman he encounters near a Depression-era “Hooverville” in the
city.

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Edward Cline, American Novelist

Edward Cline was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1946. After graduating from high school (in which he learned nothing of value) and a stint in the Air Force, he pursued his ambition to become a novelist. His first detective novel, First Prize, was published in 1988 by Mysterious Press/Warner Books, and his first suspense novel, Whisper the Guns, was published in 1992 by The Atlantean Press. First Prize was republished in 2009 by Perfect Crime. The Sparrowhawk series of novels set in England and Virginia in the pre-Revolutionary period has garnered critical acclaim (but not yet from the literary establishment) and universal appreciation from the reading public, including parents, teachers, students, scholars, and adult readers who believe that American history has been abandoned or is misrepresented by a government-dominated educational establishment. He is dedicated to Objectivism, Ayn Rand's philosophy of reason in all matters.